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Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

macrumors.com

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Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#461

Post by neltnerb »

eptcyka wrote: post #425
brookst wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation. If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider: 1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but…

[flagged]

I am surprised this take is controversial. It really seems almost certain whenever enough money is involved in controlling narratives and selling things, regardless of the details.

Certainly employees at these companies are earning more than a single dime, so even if innocent there's still an obvious conflict of interest. That doesn't mean the posters are wrong or their opinions invalid, on the contrary their direct experience is valuable to hear.

But they are certainly paid, and this is fair to remember when reading opinions.

edit: oh, I see, they're focusing on taking the last little bit super literally. great.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#462

Post by ChickeNES »

eptcyka wrote: post #425
brookst wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation. If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider: 1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but…

[flagged]

Because caring about factual accuracy isn’t “defending a corporation.” A claim doesn’t become true (or false!) just because it concerns a "billion dollar corporation".

Besides, Apple isn't a "billion dollar corporation", it's a multi-trillion dollar corporation.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#463

Post by dofm »

Gigachad wrote: post #460
dofm wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also willing to overpay to not be reliant on cloud things, to have control of local hardware. My biggest problem with buying a Mac Studio is that even in the case of the M5 Max models, I can’t think of any non-AI macOS applications in my creative life that have anywhere near that level of hardware requirements, and nor can I forecast that I would within its ordinary supported lifespan as a macOS machine. These m…

I think the best move right now is to just wait a couple of years. There is room for the prices to drop dramatically. Buying the highest spec mac at the peak prices probably isn't a financially sensible move.

I tend to buy secondhand anyway, and yes, almost certainly it's best to wait.

At the moment, speccing out a local box more powerful than the machine I am using is largely an intellectual exercise, but it does have some value for understanding what a client might be able to use if they absolutely require on-premises inference, and I do have a couple who fall into that zone. So I am trying to keep up to date in principle, but the built machines don't get beyond the shopping cart.

The M5 Ultra has probably smoothed out the major issues of AI on Apple Silicon (prefill doesn't suck anymore) but the way Apple marketed that chip strongly suggests they are now fully aware of the strengths but also the limitations of their architecture and will get a lot more done.

It's properly put the (fairly equivalently priced) DGX Spark in the shade, though.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#464

Post by Corrado »

btown wrote: post #316
alasdair_ wrote: post #172

There is a lot of "AI demand" that isn't just running inference on an LLM whose weights you downloaded. I'm training a model using reinforcement learning with self-play. I can and do use vast.ai when scaling but for experiments it's far faster, and cheaper, to run it locally until the bugs are all figured out. Just provisioning a new instance and copying the relevant checkpoints and things can take 25 minutes. It's z…

A C-level executive I know is getting a top-of-the-line new Mac simply to function as a personal build server and host for agentic coding instances - they are able to orchestrate so many parallel projects that they're hitting RAM limits from sessions and the builds and local test runs they're kicking off (largly unsupervised). Before AI, they'd only had a MacBook Air; this completely changes their workflows. They tal…

The general problem I have with this is that I think those C-level executive should be doing C-level stuff and not programmer stuff. If you're using AI to help with your main job, great! If you're using AI to do someone else's work, then I think maybe you should change jobs. If you want to be a programmer, go for it! But not at the expense of your "real" job.

I'm pretty sure the C-level people don't want us programmers faffing around with their roles. Why are they encroaching into ours? Don't they already have enough to do; setting the direction of the company, making sure it's profitable, selling things to people, etc.?

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#465

Post by supriyo-biswas »

ChickeNES wrote: post #462
eptcyka wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Because caring about factual accuracy isn’t “defending a corporation.” A claim doesn’t become true (or false!) just because it concerns a "billion dollar corporation". Besides, Apple isn't a "billion dollar corporation", it's a multi-trillion dollar corporation.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/if-its-worth-your-time-to-l... elucidates this argument very clearly:

> People don’t like nitpickers. “He literally did the WELL AKTUALLY!” If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal?

> Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it.

> If one side lies to make all of their arguments sound 5% stronger, then over long enough it adds up. Unless they want to be left behind, the other side has to make all of their arguments 5% stronger too. Then there’s a new baseline - why not 10%? Why not 20%? This mechanism might sound theoretical when I describe it this way, but go to any space where corrections are discouraged, and you will see exactly this.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#466

Post by apexalpha »

nullbio wrote: post #352

I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple. When this started spreading a day or two ago, it was all from no-name spam media sites that are paid to publish articles. They all claimed "a source" is where they got the intel, without specifying the source. It was spreading like wildfire on socials. The same thing happened with Mac Mini's and OpenClaw. Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for Ope…

I personally know 5 people using Macs with their unified memory for OpenClaw / Hermes.

Also the demand is really there. Or do you think Apple just removed certain options from sale for fun in stead of RAM being out of stock?

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#467

Post by metchio »

Gigachad wrote: post #374
hx8 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using it since about February, still using it. It's running on my old M1 MBP. I have a lot of automations on OpenClaw, things like "Every week summarize this data and send me a message about it" or "check when a new version of an NPM package comes out and submit a PR to update it." It's quite expensive from a value per token perspective. It's quite cheap from a "send one message from my phone and it does so…

All of the use cases I see seem like stuff that’s better performed by normal software. Dependabot will watch for new versions and submit a PR for free. AI for developing software that runs predictably seems more useful than AI performing actions like a program would.

yeah i think the deterministic part (sending email, submit PR) is usually done by a normale script/software, agents are useful for summarizing text in a smart way, expecially if you need to aggregate text from multiple sources and it's natural language (not structured data)

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#468

Post by metchio »

I bought one in April '26 for two reasons: I needed a small computer to replace my old one that died, I didn't want to spend more than 600 euros, and the alternatives were not great. Second reason: at that time it was mis-priced on Amazon.IE and I bought it for like 550, one week after my purchase the price bumped to 750.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#469

Post by Dylan16807 »

Grombobulous wrote: post #394
try-working wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the upsell ladder. This is how they get you to buy a more expensive tier or two. At first I was only going to look at 64gb or 128gb Max, but ended up here.

I also think it’s possible that it may be best to continue waiting on the Mac side of the house despite the increasing prices. I think that some of the hardware design folks have been blindsided by AI demand and we haven’t really gotten that next generation AI hardware yet, to the point where buying M5 isn’t going to make sense in a couple of years. Rumors seem to be that the M7 is the generation that Apple is lookin…

> Rumors seem to be that the M7 is the generation that Apple is looking to push AI performance much further.

What specifically does that mean? The M5 series has 10 cores per 128 bits of memory bus; are the cores unable to keep up with the RAM? I thought they did and memory bandwidth was usually the bottleneck. But the memory bus is already very highly clocked and goes up to 1024 bits wide so it's hard to picture memory bandwidth having a huge leap.

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

#470

Post by Dylan16807 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #392
Aurornis wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy tokens on OpenRouter right now from companies who serve tokens as a business and who are not selling at a loss. The frontier labs have very high prices for inference. The prices are actually going down, not up.

I thought the discussion was about "frontier labs" in the cloud versus open at home. Others running open models in the cloud is a nice third alternative, but not a solution for those that need frontier models, which I believe continue to need training as well as inference. These are currently heavily subsidized and hardware constrained several years out.

They said "equivalent level model". It's reasonable to assume that open source models in 12 months will be just as good as frontier models today.

And this sub-discussion is more about whether there will continue to be some cloud model that's both more capable and cheaper than local, not so much about what kind of cloud model it is.

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